Marvelous Manicure: Christmas 2011

Hello all!

Now that Remembrance Day (or as I like to call it, Novembrance Day) is behind us, it is officially acceptable to start listening to Christmas carols and decorating for the holidays. One of my favourite parts of the holidays is getting to do themed manicures! Last year I took my inspiration from Starbucks' holiday to-go cups, but this year I wanted to do more of a Christmas tree ornament type of thing. I started with Midnight Kiss by China Glaze, which is a molten gold. I followed by doing a very light coating of OPI's Bring On the Bling on just the tips of the nail in a gradient style. Bring On the Bling is a great glitter from the Burlesque collection, and has gold, green, and red micro-glitter: perfect for the holidays. Finally, I accented two nails on each hand with holly berries and leaves, which I created used some nail pens.

 

While I'm on the holiday theme, I may as well attach last-year's Christmas manicure, which I'll probably repeat this year - I loved it! For it I used OPI's Malaga Wine, a dusting of loose red glitter, a white nail pen, and a touch of sliver glitter for the snowflake centres. (Sorry for the blurriness!) Enjoy!

Marvelous Manicure: Snake Print

I know everyone, it has been way too long since I uploaded a manicure pic.  However, after all Friday night's partying on Saturday I was very ready to settle down to some docile activity.  I've also been absolutely obsessed with snake print recently, which you should all know is a hot ticket item this season.  I'll confess that I didn't always love it the way I do now.  In fact, I used to think it was trashy and gross, which is why this sudden love for it surprises me.

But now for the details: I started with a coat of Chanel's Particuliere, then used Sally Hansen nail pens in gold and black to add the scales.  Overall I'm pretty pleased with how things turned out, especially given how damn hard snake print is to replicate.  I won't even get into how long it took to do my right hand.

Royal Wedding Manicure

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a treat for you today.  You are already aware I majored in History at university, but many of you will not know that I specialized in British history or that the monarchy is one of my favourite parts of history to study (I took an entire course entirely centred on the British monarchy and it was awesome!).  Anyway, as such I have a deep fondness for the institution and a fascination with it, so the upcoming royal nuptials have me very excited!

Besides being an incredible continuation of ceremonies that extend back thousands of years, I also find the upcoming wedding interesting in a more social context.  It's so lovely to see the world (well, maybe just the Commonwealth) get excited about something together.  After so many years of endless headlines on the market crash, its consequent recession, oil spills, wars, and the usual doom and gloom it's so refreshing to finally see people coming together and being happy.  Nothing gets people's spirits up quite like a wedding, and considering royal weddings only happen once every thirty or so years (I wasn't yet alive when Charles and Diana married) it's definitely something remarkable.

So, in keeping with all this my mother, sister and I will all be staying up until one or two in the morning or whenever when things will be starting live in England and we're having a little Royal Wedding Party.  There will be lots of tea and we're all dressing up (my sister and I are going to do our best Kate Middleton impressions).  I have a veil I'm going to bust out while I believe my sister is going to sport a hat with a whole lot of feathers.  Today we picked up replica rings of Kate/Diana's engagement ring, and - the theme of this post - painted our nails Will & Kate Wedding-style.  Anyway, I thought I'd share the photos of the finished result.

My original plan had been to use our nail stamper for the crowns and the bells, but it was being SO UNCOOPERATIVE so I eventually gave up and had to freehand it.  So, it's not quite as tidy as I would have liked but I'm still pretty pleased.

 

"W&K" - the ampersand is a little blurred but ohhhh well.

 

The replica!  Unfortunately it's a size too big, but who's going to be choosey?

At Long Last: Christian Dior Manicure (and extras)

Okay, so I finally got around to doing my Christian Dior-inspired mani today.  And when I say I did it today,  I mean it took pretty much all day to do a satisfactory job.  While I started out using all the colours I bought - both the blues and the mauves - I didn't like how it looked so I wound up taking off the blues and making it all about the mauves, burgundies and blacks.  I used Bahama Mama and Angora Cardi by Essie, and OPI's Black Onyx and Nicole by OPI's Razzle Dazzler Matte.  And, as usual, I used my beloved Seche Vite top coat, though for a base coat I switched up my regular Seche Clear and gave my new Seche Natural a try - I'll keep you posted on how well that does.  For the details on my thumbs and pinkies I had started using one of my Sally Hansen nail pens, but it wasn't showing up clearly enough so I swapped it for one of the nail pens my sister and I picked up at the PNE a couple of years ago.

As for how I feel about the manicure, I do like it but I figure it could be a lot tidier.  While I was able to use tape successfully to do the stripes on my middle finger, it wasn't being cooperative for the matte tips on my index fingers so I had to freehand it which made it less streamlined than I usually like.  Overall it's a pretty awesome mani by my standards, but I feel it's a little too wintry to be wearing with Easter just around the corner, so in all likelihood I'll take it off and do an Easter-themed manicure in the next few days.

As for these next two photos, I was editing some old Facebook photos and found these buried away.  The leopard one speaks for itself (and no, that's not an engagement ring) and the other one was my manicure for Canada Day last summer - FYI maple leaves are HARD to freehand.

The Elephant in the Room

So along with all my other interests, I have a passionate relationship with nail polish and nail art.  As such, I'm going to try and regularly post my manicures for those of you looking for some inspiration.  This week's manicure was actually inspired by an elephant bracelet my aunt bought me when traveling in Costa Rica.  I used a white nail pen for the details, and the base is Particulière by Chanel, which I sorely need to wear more often to justify spending like thirty dollars on it last spring*cringe*.

 

Update:

I went digging around on my Blackberry and found some old-ish manicures which I think qualify as cool enough to post.  First up we have my Christmas manicure, inspired by Starbucks' holiday cups.  I used OPI's Malaga Wine, sprinkled ruby red sparkles over it, then used my white nail pen to do the snowflakes and gave them silver sparkle centers.

Up next is a version of a manicure I saw on Emerald Sparkled.  She titled hers Whimsical (I'm too lazy to hunt her version down, but if you do a search on her site you'll find it.  Hers was an interpretation of a manicure she saw on someone else's blog, but I like hers best.  I used Sweet Rose by Gosh, Essie's Van D'Go, Essie's Innocent, and Sparkle Me Happy from Icing by Claire's nail polish line.  The stripes and the bow I did using my white nail pen.

This next manicure was a bit of a convenient mistake.  I wanted to go for a sparkly zebra print, but instead it wound up looking like a view of the galaxy.  I used Lunar and Star by Revlon, then used a stamp to add a silver zebra print.